Shortly before the Six-Day War, Soviet MiG-25s flew over Dimona, home to Israel’s nuclear program…
Gideon Remez and Isabella Ginor claimed in their book “Foxbats over Dimona,” published 15 years ago, that the war was planned by the Soviet Union to destroy Israel’s nuclear program.
According to the Israeli authors, the Soviets sent the top-secret Mig-25s, still in the experimental stage, over Dimona in southern Israel to provoke Israel into war and ensure that the planned Soviet-Arab counter-attack would destroy the nuclear target.
The Soviets also sent nuclear-armed submarines to the Israeli coast in case Israel already had nuclear weapons and wanted to use them, and were prepared for a possible landing.
Satellite image of the Dimona facility
The only flaw in the authors’ book is that it fails to provide irrefutable documentary evidence to support its claims, as they say it is unlikely that any such documents survived;
the most important ones were probably destroyed and orders were issued only orally.
This is why it was greeted with great joy when, in 2007, the Russian Air Force confirmed for the first time the rumor that Soviet MiG-25s had flown over Dimona shortly before the Six-Day War. Drobyshevsky’s statement, which probably appeared on the Russian Ministry of Defense website unintentionally, had a completely different context — the anniversary of the pilot training school, whose graduates included a pilot who flew the MiG-25s in 1967.
„In 1967, the military heroism and high level of combat training of Colonel A.S. Bezsevecs (Hero of the Soviet Union, Honorary Air Force Pilot, Retired Major General of the Air Force) was manifested during Operation Egypt, and
this allowed him to conduct reconnaissance flights over Israeli territory with a MiG-25RB aircraft”
– said the Drobyshevsky article.
The statement also corroborates the personal testimony of Bezsevecs’ superior, Lieutenant General Alexander Vibornov, who repeatedly mentioned the deployment.
The book’s allegations were published in the Post, stating that the war “originated in a scheme by the Soviet politburo to eliminate (…) the country’s aspiration to develop nuclear weapons. The piece was widely disputed and then reprinted by several respected newspapers, including Russia’s Komsomolskaya Pravda, which wrote that it had
„contacted the veterans quoted in the book, all of whom confirmed the claims made in the article.”
The events leading up to the 1967 Six-Day War were previously explained as having been „provoked by the Soviet Union, which provided false information about Israeli troop movements but did not want war, and later did its best to mitigate the consequences of the war in cooperation with the United States.”
But the book completely contradicts this accepted argument.
It says that the Soviets knew Israel was developing an atomic bomb and wanted to provoke a war to destroy the reactor at Dimona.
However, the Israelis’ swift victory thwarted the Soviet invasion, and Israel’s overwhelming success proved decisive in defining the conflict. Because the Soviet plans failed to materialize, historians of the war over the past 40 years have ignored, underestimated or simply failed to understand the Soviet Union’s role in the crisis and its plans to reshape the Middle East.
